Transparent Things

I admit it, I haven’t read it—an opening disclaimer I use far too often—but I’m intrigued by Neil MacGregors’s “objects” histories:  A History of the World in 100 Objects and Shakespeare’s Restless World: a Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects. As I am always desperately seeking structure for my own writing, particularly when I presume to write about such an unwieldy and self-invented topic as Urbiphilia, I’m wondering if one can offer a portrait of a city or a place in a certain number of objects.  I would have to set up some rules of course--define object, for example—but it might be worth a try.  

We do read places that way, through objects, and the accumulation over time of a mental map of these objects is what defines any given city for each of us. These aren’t general objects, but specific ones, rooted in this particular city at this particular time; they are not concepts or classes of things, but percepts.  An object of unremarkable ordinariness all of a sudden shines through in a secular hierophany, saturated with the qualities of this place.  That’s why we buy souvenirs, or snatch little bits of place to take home in our pockets. From these we construct our memory palaces.

I have a chunk of white stone, kicked loose from the beautiful mosaic pavement of the Rua Augusta in Lisbon.  It conjures memories: of three weeks in summer 2002 with a diverse and somewhat fractious group of students and faculty; of all the difficulties that encrusted that particular program; of the taste of vinho verde and olives; of heat and blinding sun, and my mental map of the city.  Because I’m an architect, I also attend to the stone itself, the material reality of that street.  It isn't only a device or instrument of memory, it is a thing itself.  There are streets and plazas all over the world made of such small pieces of stone. Each one was hewn, chosen, cradled, and placed by someone on his knees with the sun on his back. In many the fan shaped pattern still telegraphs the radius of reach of one individual, a beautiful result of the effort to save effort.  It doesn’t seem right to call these surfaces “pavements;” let’s save that word for viscous liquids spread by heavy equipment. These are floors. Wherever and whenever they were first laid, whether the Piazza San Marco, the Rua Augusta, the synapse between the East and West buildings of the National Gallery, the bricks of Old Town Alexandria, these floors tell a remarkably complex story of power, social hierarchy, value, and desire.  

Nabakov, in Transparent Things, warns us not to treat objects like this:  “When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention my lead us to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment.  Transparent things, through which the past shines!”  Well, Vlad, I’m not a novice; I’m a trained professional on closed track and the sinking is voluntary.  If one is in the business of designing the future, we depend on the transparency of things to understand what we value.